Part 7 (1/2)

PESSIMISM.--Coming, as it did, at the end of a generation of dogmatic optimism, this p.r.o.nouncement is symptomatic of a certain disillusionment which had already begun to mar the fair picture of Positivist prophecy.

The human race seemed destined to an ambiguous future; the parabola of progress would one day reach its summit, and the fall begin. At last upon our planet the episode of Life would pa.s.s, and be neither forgotten nor remembered; the world would sink into the eternal silence, from which for one transitory and insignificant moment, it had awakened.[47]

NIETZSCHE.--As might have been expected, it was in Germany that the logical conclusions of a naturalistic outlook were drawn. Here, philosophic pessimism had already been introduced by Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and his disciple Nietzsche was not afraid to formulate a scheme of ethics based on the conception of ”the survival of the fittest,” and equivalent to an apotheosis of barbarism. The virtues of self-a.s.sertion, ruthlessness, and pride were to eradicate the vices of abnegation, pity, and humility. Christian morality was a disease; Christianity itself was the appropriate product of the degenerate epoch, and of the loathsome environment that gave it birth. This radical thinker, free from English ”compromise,” could be satisfied with no morality which was parasitic upon Christianity. He had clearness of vision to see whither the naturalistic road would carry its pious wayfarers. To him the moral idealism of Spencer was moons.h.i.+ne or stupidity--”the milk of pious sentiment.”

SIGNIFICANCE OF NIETZSCHE.--Nietzsche has come in for a fair share of abuse, but it is only just to say that philosophy stands heavily endebted to this thinker. He was not afraid to draw logical conclusions, and to put questions which more conventional philosophers had preferred should remain in the background.

It is well for a moralist to arise, once in a generation, who will clear his own mind of cant and, without undue respect for the conventions, approach the really fundamental questions in a spirit of sincerity. The extravagant impieties of Nietzsche may have shocked his hearers, but they have cleared the air. He exposed, perhaps with too little _finesse_, the nakedness of Naturalism, and tore off that mantle of idealism under which it had been masquerading. And he may be said, by so doing, to have written _finis_ at the foot of a chapter in the history of philosophy.

CHAPTER X

REACTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY

VICISSITUDES OF IDEALISM.--At the beginning of the last chapter we noticed the early collapse of idealism in Germany. But the prophets of Romanticism, when they were no longer honoured at home, found an hospitable reception elsewhere, and especially in England. Indeed, even before the prestige of idealism had begun to decline in Germany, Englishmen had been introduced to it by the writings and translations of S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). These two popularisers of German ideas were _litterateurs_ rather than professional philosophers, but for that very reason their vogue and influence were the wider.

COLERIDGE.--Coleridge was in spirit a genuine Romanticist; being, as were some of the most notable of the German school--e.g., Goethe and Schiller--a poet as well as a philosopher. In his _Biographia Literaria_ he has left behind the story of his intellectual and spiritual development. He acknowledges his debt to Kant, to the Romanticists, and in particular to Sch.e.l.ling, whose ”intuitionism” was naturally congenial to him. Coleridge was never able to embody his philosophical creed in any single work; he does not seem to have possessed the necessary power of application. He was unfortunate in being a man of weak character, and his ineffectiveness struck his contemporaries. But in spite of these disadvantages--his sentimentality, the lack of clearness of his thought, his weakness for opium--he certainly exercised an important influence, especially in the realm of theology. His ideas, though vague, were calculated to awaken the speculative habit, and, introduced as they were, to a wide circle, were fruitful and stimulating. English theology had been, in the eighteenth century, of an arid kind, and the English philosophical tradition lacked, for the most part, appreciation of those deeper aspects of reality which had appealed to German thinkers.

Coleridge, by introducing German speculation to his countrymen, was able ”to free theology of some of its narrowness, and to deepen and enlarge the spiritual outlook of his age.”[48]

THOMAS CARLYLE.--Carlyle was a man of a very different temper, whose att.i.tude towards Coleridge was ”half contemptuous, half compa.s.sionate.”

A typically Carlylean characterisation of him may be found in the _Life of Sterling_:

”He was thought to hold--he alone in England--the key of German and other Transcendentalisms.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days escaped from black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with G.o.d, Freedom, Immortality, still his. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma....”

”The good man ... gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings ... the deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength.... He spoke as if preaching--preaching earnestly and hopelessly the weightiest things.”

Carlyle himself had all the character and industry that Coleridge lacked, and it was another side of German idealism that had appealed to him. The Scotchman was of the same fibre and stock as that other half-Scotchman, Kant. Here was the source from which he had drawn his inspiration. We see in Carlyle the same moral earnestness, the same ”toughness” of thought, the same absence of ”sentimental moons.h.i.+ne.”

From Kant, too, he derives a vigorous independence of thought, a religious respect for individuality, a horror of shams and affectation.

Kant was a true child of the Reformation, and Carlyle is a genuine disciple.

In a single important respect, however, he differed from (and improved upon) his master. Kant lacked, or at least did not display, the saving grace of humour; in Carlyle this quality looks out from every page--keen, satirical, sometimes bitter, sometimes grotesque; he ridiculed his own generation, its vices, its prejudices, its superst.i.tions.

SARTOR RESARTUS.--For our purpose, _Sartor Resartus_--that profound and humorous book--is Carlyle's masterpiece: here all the characteristic Kantian doctrines may be found.

The ”philosophy of clothes”--which is the quaint t.i.tle behind which Kantian idealism is made to masquerade--starts from the thought that just as an acquaintance with his clothes will not reveal to us the man, so an acquaintance with _phenomena_ (which is all that science can claim to give us) cannot reveal to us the real ground of existence, which remains an inscrutable mystery. We must ”look on clothes till they become transparent,” if we could understand reality.

”To the eye of vulgar Logic what is man? An omnivorous biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.”

And so with Nature; to science it is a mechanism, to the understanding heart it is ”the living garment of G.o.d.”

”It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-Vesture of the Eternal.... The whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing....”

The visible world is but a symbol of a profound and awful reality; and all Nature's products, in their degree, symbols as well: but of these, man is the highest. ”The true SHEKINAH is Man: where else is the G.o.d'S PRESENCE manifested, not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?”

This leads up to the essential doctrine of the Kantian system: that man is a creature of two worlds, who has a foot in either; hence in the phenomenal world he can never find satisfaction.

”Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in jointstock company, to make one s...o...b..ack Happy? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two, for the s...o...b..ack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach....”

”There is in man a HIGHER than Love of happiness: he can do without happiness and instead thereof find Blessedness! has it not been to preach forth this same HIGHER that sages and martyrs ... have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony to the G.o.d-like that is in man?”